NEW PRIME MINISTER IN LATVIA: “Latvian President Raimonds Vējonis has nominated MP Māris Kučinskis to be the country’s next prime minister. Kučinskis belongs to the centrist Greens and Farmers Union (ZZS) party.” http://bit.ly/230oSbh

NEW PARLIAMENT PRESIDENT IN SPAIN: Patxi López, a Socialist, won the speakership of the Spanish parliament yesterday, with the support of centrist party Ciudadanos. No new government has been formed following December elections. http://yhoo.it/1Oj2bYc

EUROCRAT JET-SETTERS: Commission staff showed restraint in 2015, taking just 97,318 work trips. That’s down from 101,919 in 2014, according to written answers from the Commission to MEP questions. Given that most “assistants” (AST grade staff in Commission-speak) never travel for work, that leaves 13,590 staff at the higher “adviser” (AD) grade taking the bulk of the 97,318 trips. If we grant that every assistant may take one trip per year — for example to a team away-day or to accompany the boss to a key speech or conference — that leaves about six work trips per adviser.

COVERAGE AROUND EUROPE OF THE UNPRECEDENTED INVESTIGATION INTO POLAND: The European Commission is now applying a “rule of law mechanism” to investigate if new laws in Poland conform with EU laws and fundamental rights.

BATTLESHIP TIMMERMANS — GUNS BLAZING AND UNDER ATTACK: What goes up must come down. It looks like silver-tongued Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans may be descending from lofty heights back into the realms of other politicians. The latest clue: a hostile press pack, made to wait 75 minutes for him to discuss the weekly meeting of Commissioners yesterday, and then left largely unconvinced by his explanations. The battle fronts …

1) The Timmermans-engineered migration deal with Turkey is going nowhere fast;
2) He backed out of an on-record discussion with members of the U.K. House of Lords on Brexit;
3) The new Poland government is dissing him and ignoring him; and
4) Yesterday he was strung up by his fine words on better regulation. It turned out trade officials were trying to skirt Timmermans’ “better regulation” system on an upcoming China trade rules decision, and he was left carrying the can with journalists. He finally conceded that after a long debate among Commissioners, and at the insistence of Jean-Claude Juncker, there would have to be more consultation on the issue, but didn’t quite come out and state clearly there would be an impact assessment. Instead he hedged: “If there are measures to be taken in relation to this issue then of course these measures will have to be assessed for impact. Those are the rules.”

“As you might recall, I was one of the people who thought up this idea of the rule of law mechanism.”

“This has nothing to do with politics whatsoever. The internal politics of Poland don’t concern me, I don’t know about it, I don’t want to know about it.”

“You know that I think the Polish government wants dialogue, regardless of the tone of the letter” (the one from Warsaw that dissed Timmermans for being too left-wing and told him to show “more restraint” in dealing with Poland).

Journalist Marc Peeperkorn: “What does the assessment you are now going to make actually consist of?”Timmermans: “The first stage of that is to assess the situation and in assessing the situation of course we want to get the view out of Poland of how they see things, and after this hopefully productive dialogue we can draw conclusions.”

EUROVISION CLIMBDOWN: We’re now told in writing that European Broadcasting Union President Jean-Paul Philippot “misspoke” when he warned that Poland could be thrown out of the Eurovision song contest; the organization is retracting the suggestion. http://politi.co/1SOMQBS

QUOTE DU JOUR — GUY VERHOFSTADT: “In just a few weeks, Polish President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Beata Szydło have managed to place their country on a ruinous path”; no surprise there … until the punchline: if the current Polish government were to seek EU membership now, “it would fail.”

THE CALM VOICE OF GAZETA WYBORCZA: While some other media depict the German government as colonists picking over a map of Poland, newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza is a rare calm voice:“By joining the EU we undertook not only to observe certain economic rules but also to respect democratic principles and civil rights. … The EU is therefore entitled to protest if these values are not respected … It is now the government’s duty to prove that those fears are unfounded … The EU is not an institution that is hostile to the Poles, but a community of which we form part and for which we all bear joint responsibility.” http://bit.ly/1P0DKCm

MIGRATION — THE MIRACLE OF FINGERPRINTING MACHINES: The Commission yesterday discovered, six months after refugees starting landing at a rate of thousands per day on Greek islands, that those islands could do with an extra 90 fingerprinting machines to register new arrivals. It dedicated a whole section of its daily news bulletin to the development, relegated the Poland debate down the page, and bumped the China trade debate altogether. http://bit.ly/1n0aQGi

EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT — KLAUS WELLE’S DREAM: Tara Palmeri reports on the Parliament’s secretary general, a would-be European founding father whose vision of making the assembly more like the U.S. Congress hasn’t exactly worked out. http://politi.co/1n0U0aq

EVEN MORE POLAND — ENERGY TALKS TODAY: The next Polish test case is energy policy, reports Kalina Oroschakoff, and next in the firing line is EU Energy and Climate Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete, who is in Warsaw. The Poles kept quiet at the Paris climate talks — despite reservations — and now they are cashing in their chips.

The topics: clean coal technologies; the upcoming “effort sharing” decision on emission reduction targets for sectors that aren’t covered by the Emissions Trading System; the Paris climate deal; the Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline project and making the gas market more transparent. Poles have been vocal in their opposition to Nord Stream 2. Poland’s understanding of the Paris Agreement (in Polish) is here: http://bit.ly/1QhnIUE

THE TRADE TIMELINE THAT WON’T WORK: “You’ve known about this for 15 years,” began a question from Poppy Bullock, one of many from journalists to European Commission spokespeople yesterday. Journalists were surprised that the Commission couldn’t foresee concerns about relaxing trade rules for China when there are still ongoing legal cases against the country, the U.S. is opposed to change, and everyone else could see them. But mostly they wanted to know how the Commission planned to sequence and squeeze the following actions into just 11 months, to meet a December 2016 deadline for how to handle China:
– Run a public debate and internal “inter-service” consultation over several months
– Squeeze in an impact assessment (which typically takes 6-12 months)
– Achieve a co-decision between all the EU institutions on whatever is finally proposed by the Commission (a minimum four months, but typically two years)

WHAT A ‘MORE POLITICAL’ COMMISSION LOOKS LIKE: Yesterday EU-accredited journalists wanted to know: Would the Commission conduct an impact assessment on the effects of relaxing anti-dumping trade rules concerning China? Would it publish an existing study on the subject? And would the Commission apply the existing five criteria in EU law for determining whether or not China is now a “market economy”? We didn’t get any clear answers to these questions; here’s the Commission press material, which fails to tackle the key issues: http://bit.ly/1OQ1Iyn

ITALY — TOWN HALL POLITICS TEST THE 5 STAR MOVEMENT: James Panichi reports from Livorno on the growing pains facing the upstart political party. http://politi.co/1TWNmMs

GE’S JOB GYNMASTICS — THE JOB CUTS THAT AREN’T REALLY CUTS: General Electric Co. is expected to today announce it is moving its headquarters from Connecticut to Boston in the U.S., but has also said it will eliminate about 6,500 jobs in Europe as it integrates its new Alstom energy business. 765 positions will go in France and 1,700 in Germany. But there’s a catch: GE promised to actually increase jobs in France by 1,000 as part of the merger approval deal. That won’t be any comfort to the 765 people about to be fired, but it does mean GE has to create 1,765 new jobs in total in France.http://bloom.bg/1P0Djbn

EUROPE IN BRUSSELS — 2016 FIGURES RELEASED OF DIPLOMATIC IMPACT ON BRUSSELS: 121,000 jobs, the number-one diplomatic city in the world (5,400 diplomats) … There’s a lot of self-congratulation in this report, by Visit Brussels, for the city the Financial Times calls the best major European city for “human potential and lifestyle.” The authors do at least note that the city also has an employment rate of just 54.3 percent, which somewhat explains why 1 in 3 live below the poverty line. Infographic here | Full report here

IN BRUSSELS YOU WILL FIND:– 102 German journalists, the most foreign journalists from a single country
– 1 million square meters of office space used by the European Commission
– The headquarters of 11 intergovernmental institutions, besides the EU
– “At least” 20,000 individual lobbyists
– 29 international schools educating 22,772 pupils

PARLIAMENT — NEW CAR EMISSION STANDARDS VOTE DELAYED: MEPs were scheduled to vote during next week’s plenary session on whether to object to an October decision by EU country experts giving diesel carmakers more time and leeway to comply with new EU nitrous oxide emissions tests. The center-left and center-right aren’t ready to agree to the watered down proposals, so the vote has been postponed. Anca Gurzu explains: http://politi.co/1ZvbA7C

IS VW GETTING AN EASY RIDE IN EUROPE? European governments may be letting the United States do their dirty work for them … The U.S. Justice Department is suing Volkswagen for up to $46 billion, but don’t expect the same to happen in the EU, experts say, where the regulatory regime is softer and Daimler and BMW together hauled in revenues of €413 billion in 2014, far bigger than the German federal budget. Here’s more from Reuters: http://reut.rs/1ReQOnK

CLARIFICATION: For anyone confused by my reference yesterday to “13 peaceful protesters were gunned down” in Lithuania 25 years ago, I meant Soviet troops had attacked the protestors, not that the protesters had behaved violently.

REPUBLICAN RESPONSE TO OBAMA’S STATE OF THE UNION SPEECH: “While Democrats in Washington bear much responsibility for the problems facing America today, they do not bear it alone. There is more than enough blame to go around,” said South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. “We as Republicans need to own that truth. We need to recognize our contributions to the erosion of the public trust in America’s leadership. We need to accept that we’ve played a role in how and why our government is broken.” http://slate.me/1N6R290

BY THE NUMBERS — US STATE OF THE UNION SPEECH: Craig Winneker crunched the data so you don’t have to. Europe came up empty-handed. Obama didn’t mention the word “Europe” once in the 58-minute speech. Asia got two mentions, Africa 3 and terrorism 7. TTIP was another zero. http://politi.co/1OqtJsv

BRUSSELS LIFE — BBC FEATURES INTERNATIONAL CHORALE OF BRUSSELS: BBC Radio 3 has featured the International Chorale of Brussels, including a line from one of its members, former UK MEP Graham Watson, on the joys of singing here. As an MEP for 20 years, he says, “I never had time to know people outside the European Parliament or the confines of the European institutions. I never really had time to relax. But when I go and sing once a week, there is a spring in my step for the rest of the week. The cares of the day disappear.” LISTEN: http://bbc.in/1Oh1f6G h/t Richard Hudson

COFFEE TIPS: 1) We hear that Caffe Italiano on Rue d’Arlon is now using fresh milk rather than UHT milk. 2) If you want to wake up and smell the coffee with an over-representation of directors and directors-general and ambassadors, then head to Cafe de la Presse, at the Bois de la Cambre end of Avenue Louise on Sunday mornings.

BIRTHDAYS: Catherine Bearder MEP

THANKS to: Mike Allen, Craig Winneker, Carmen Paun, Tara Palmeri.

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